


Assignment 96

by sovay



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Metaphorical Uses of Chemistry, Original Character(s), Photography, Physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 15:33:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15342909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovay/pseuds/sovay
Summary: The transuranics are unstable.





	Assignment 96

_The transuranics are unstable._ Steel had said it himself not too long ago, half-frozen in a farmhouse kitchen while nursery rhymes unbuilt the stones around them; it was a truism of existence, as unfailing as the Earth-assignment of medium atomic weights or the everywhere fraying fragility of time, and he had not repeated it out of mere received prejudice. Even by the loose and shadowy standards of their calling, he had never worked a job with a transuranic that went as planned. Neptunium and Plutonium crackled with belligerence and suspicion, fought with anyone assigned them, fought with one another, eventually fought with themselves if left unprovoked for any appreciable length of time. Fermium was vague and volatile, as disconnected as if he had just stumbled out of the vast aftershock of a blast. Californium had sullen, lowering moods and a sense of humor that grated against the bone. Steel had stood enough teasing for seriousness—mostly from Silver, but anything the quick-tongued technician said had a way of sticking—to feel as though he should at least give the transuranics the grudging benefit of the doubt when it came to reputations, but then he had never endangered an assignment with his own ego or insecurity or sheer senseless contrariness: he had never let himself get in the way of the work. He had never yet had to call for help, either, but he had come closest on the small, icy, lightless moon where Plutonium had turned her jealous, annihilating attention on him. Watching the small figure walk toward him now out of the roaring hum of electromagnets, he felt himself cooling and stiffening, his shoulders tightening under his plain grey suit, and he forced himself warm again until the time roiling against his skin no longer caught in freeze-dried crystals. He needed to be ready and tensile, not brittle, already locked into decision. He needed not to see his fellow operators as the enemy.

None of them would ever look their age, but Curium had always appeared absurdly, disingenuously young, striding sharp and careless in her long coat the color of clinker, her heavy olive skin and her ink-shock of hair worn like a shrug in the face of her elders who were no such thing. Even at a distance, her grey-violet eyes gave her face the look of an archaic mask, ancient bright glass socketed into bronze; he had never been able to tell whether she was looking at or through him and it did not help to know that she cocked her head like that with everyone, crow-skeptical, she looked profoundly dubious about his presence and sardonically conscious that he was thinking the same.

Sapphire, he was sure, could have put an unstable element at her ease as effortlessly as she smoothed their interactions with frightened, irrational humans; Silver would almost certainly have flirted with her, juggling fire as always and mostly not getting burned. Steel with no small talk, a squarish, fairish man with a measuring face, looked straight at the approaching figure and heard himself reminding his colleague with absolute redundancy, " _Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life._ "

"No one lives in a synchrotron, Steel." Hands in her pockets, Curium flicked her unconcerned gaze down the long curve of bundled magnets and stainless steel and he wondered if she could see the electrons sleeting past them as fast as time, the hard-flung angles of concentrated light no human could stand in unburnt. The same high-density concrete shielding that kept the facility's researchers from unwanted contact with the radiation they employed was all that permitted her presence in this time and place; however firmly she must have been briefed that any damage to the structure could cost more lives than the incident she had been dispatched to deal with, he would never have guessed from the way she rapped her knuckles against the nearest coil. The noise it made was not quite physical, a faint wince of static across Steel's field of vision, the storm-light color of her eyes. "Not this part, anyway." 

"No," he agreed grimly. "So where did it get its ghosts?"

He did not like Curium's smile; it suggested she could answer the question. The magnetic field was thick with them, twisting and eddying where there should have been only a particle beam circulating in near-vacuum—blurred and corroded remnants of life in an environment that had never supported it in the first place. They looked alarmingly organic against the smooth weights of machinery, scraps of faces and smears of hands all the blackish, snail-tracked colors of erosion and damp; they seemed to come in patches, like clots of oil on a river's skin. Each blew through him and away down the storage ring almost as soon as he could fix on it, moving too slow for light and too fast for normal time. In a few seconds, the same melted forms came round again.

Without looking away from him, Curium raised her palm into the current, curved a little as if to a candle's flame; he could not tell if the faint edging of violet light where she made contact was an effect of electromagnetics or her own peculiar properties and he did not suppose he cared, really, so long as she transmitted accurately whatever data she was gathering. It did not appear to affect her air of cynical boredom. Electrons spanged from magnet to magnet in sprays of photons like headlights and the ghosts tangled and dragged in their wake. Steel waited as unimpatiently as he knew how.

"It's a . . . contamination." The last word seemed to surprise her; her hand half-closed of its own accord and she stretched her fingers wide again. "No one ever did live here. They came here when they were already dead." 

"Their bodies?"

"No." Her smile tightened, cutting further into her thin face. "Not their memories, either. No one knew who they were. No one knows even now. But they were remembered. They had been forgotten and they were remembered."

Something that had no face but a mouth and arms without hands or shoulders sloughed through him with the nauseous flip of deforming time and he thought very clearly, on the frequency no other element could hear, _It's happening faster than it should. It's almost over. We came too late—as usual. They sent us too late._ He would have let Sapphire hear him, or even Silver in extremity; to the unknown quantity of Curium, he said aloud, "Can you sense anything about the trigger?"

Now she looked as though she were holding herself against a pane of glass or an impossible high wind, her weight braced on the piecemeal illusion of human persistence. Her fingers moved restlessly, almost scrabbling. The light was darkening, royal and baleful, between them. "It's not here. I don't think it ever was. It feels like an echo. An echo of an echo." A sudden small laugh hacked out of her and her hand almost flinched shut again. "The ghost of a ghost of a ghost."

He did not want to believe that the ring was dimming around them, but when he glanced at his own hands they were pale and floating as afterimages, bruise-tinged in Curium's light. The next spectral gust went past him with a taste he recognized and he said almost before he thought of the name, "We should have had a technician." Then, urgently, "Curium—"

But she was sifting the beam for its contaminants even as he spoke, the sticky, tarnished refractions of real chemicals, real metals deposited and developed in a century of industry and progress, fogged and degraded along with the images they had captured in the decades since: unstable maybe, but no one would call her slow on the uptake. Her voice was as precise now as a dispatcher's, swiftly professional as any medium-weight diplomat's: "Iron. Copper. Silver. Mercury. Gold. A photographic process of the mid-nineteenth century. Plates and vapors, fumes and solutions. Alchemy made affordable. When the elemental concentrations that comprise the image are obscured from the naked eye, their distribution can still be mapped by rapid-scanning X-ray." Her other hand glowed in the iron-core coils, absorbing as much information from the synchrotron's ferromagnetic guts as she had from the ghosts it had bred. 

With Sapphire, he would have stepped forward to take her arm; he had no desire to touch Curium to communicate his question, crucial as it was, and he did not like to think of it as a constraint. "Can they restore the original image?"

"Not to be seen. Not by them, not under that much time. What they can do—what they _did_ do—is recreate it."

He could see it then, as neatly as a blueprint, a mess of angular momentum and sympathetic magic accidentally touched off by the same unfathomable impulse toward old things and mixed ages that led humans to manage antique shops or establish museums, stockpiling the triggers for space-time catastrophe like weapons of mass destruction or staple crops. "It was carried forward in time with each iteration," Steel said slowly. "Then it was introduced into a machine designed for the storage and production of different kinds of light. That was the trigger—the same light that created the original image. A little trapped piece of time and it wanted out."

When Curium replaced her hands in her pockets, the purplish glow that had begun to drip from her wrists and elbows went out so suddenly that Steel blinked a little in the gloom, except that he could still see its corona in her hair, touching her eyes like a sleepless night. "It's using the synchrotron," she said, her voice her own again, tired, a little drawling. Her mouth raked a faint version of its knowing smile. "It's interfering with it. The ghosts scatter the particles and fill the available space. Like cancer cells crowding out healthy flesh. The acceleration keeps them going, just like the light they once were. The beam won't last more than another hour, but it doesn't need to. Time will have broken here, permanently, before then—here, where they play with the smallest pieces of the universe. They saw their faces again, you see. Their faces were lost and they saw them again."

Another skein of ghosts tumbled past in its own seedy light; Steel could see the traces of photography in it now, the powdery silts of mercury and silver, the fine fixative of gold under the smutch and scaling of oxides, the human echo soft as bruised fruit at its heart. "We _could_ have used a technician," he muttered, but something in him had relaxed for the first time since the assignment had come through: he knew what to do with echoes, even ones strong enough to wear thin places between time and all that lay outside it, and he could even see where a transuranic might be of use in this snarl of particle physics and decaying history. For this work, he did not even need to take off his jacket. He began to drop his temperature and watched Curium's smile return.

He was fascinated to see that she dressed in something like student drag under her coat of no particular vintage; she had stripped it within the first few minutes, alight from crown to heel with the violet fire that looked no brighter than embers but left a star-white stutter across Steel's vision whenever he looked away. It ran as freely as blood from her hands and he thought without embarrassment that he could have used Lead's reliable insulation between them and not only because he was colder now than the liquid helium that flowed around the storage ring, the deep absolute cold that mired ghosts in time like winter molasses and ached in every bone and fiber of his body and could not be helped, not unless he wanted to set Curium on the ghosts like a cat on moths and risk a crack in the shielding that might introduce new factors into the problem—new deaths, new human imprints, whatever mysterious entanglements of the subatomic level she had alluded to. He froze and she burned and the echoes neither ashed like paper nor melted like slag but cindered in small fizzing puffs of sparks, like salts thrown on a fire. Steel thought they looked most human then, illuminated between Curium's cupped hands like the flame of a paper lantern, but there were no minds behind those stiff or smiling faces, no motives in those clasped hands or folded arms, and he could have done nothing for them had there been. He did not let himself wonder if her light was sticking to him, what processes he would need to undergo when they were done. Her eyes were bright coin and burnt violets and she stepped as if she were dancing with him and she had not tried to kill him yet.

She did not try once, even when she was shrugging her coat back on afterward and Steel who had slid down against the frost-whitened concrete was gathering himself to his feet as stiffly as if he really were so much older than she; she reached down a hand and he took it, half welcoming the pressure front of heat that rebounded through him, buzzing in his fingers long after they released. Real weariness on Curium looked like a less angular version of her careless entrance, folding her arms in her coat and leaning up against the overhanging curve of the ring for support rather than effect. He said without preamble, "I apologize. I didn't think I could rely on you."

For a moment he could not tell if it would be worse if she laughed at him or attacked him. The former he could live down, but it might take centuries; the latter, in his current state, he might not survive. One side of the transuranic's mouth crooked and then settled.

"You can't."

She said it simply, without a smile; it made her look older and less familiar, not like any other operator he had worked with before. Even her eyes were greyish again. _I don't understand,_ Steel could have said, or _Then what good are you?_ or any one of a number of pointless, obvious reactions. He kept his mouth shut and his eyes open and waited, in the one way he was good at waiting, for the unspoken thing to reveal itself to him.

As if he were a ghost in a wind of electrons, Curium lifted her hand to him, unfolded her fingers and opened her palm. Under her skin, she was all violet smolder and fission crackle, the energy of her nature straining at the leashes of the body it was bound into. No form she took was ever hers to stay. Steel knew his own structure, its limits and capabilities and loopholes; he knew the angles of Sapphire and the flexibility of Silver and he knew that any of them might be destroyed, but rarely could they be altered past return. In a handful of decades, a century, a millennium, Curium as he had known her would not exist; might return as a semi-stranger or a cordial ally; might have become his enemy like Plutonium in her mantle of murderous blue. No wonder she looked so young, endlessly decaying and synthesizing. No wonder she had recognized the disintegrating alchemy of ghosts. _We're all like that,_ her thoughts said, too wry to be his own. _All of us on this side. You're as you're made; we change._

Outside his head, her hand closed and withdrew; he saw a dark girl with her hands in her pockets, her eyes very nearly a human color and the twist to her mouth indistinguishable from human emotion. The way she shrugged was little more than a shoulder and an eyebrow, not actually careless at all.

"But you can trust me."

Steel nodded once and offered his arm, the same gesture he might have given Sapphire even tired to the bone. By the time the last electrons in the beam ricocheted their way through another circuit, there was nothing where the two of them had stood, not even air.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I think I faked quite a lot about how a synchrotron works, almost certainly including some of the layout and dimensions, and I do not intend any disservice to the real-life team who discovered how to retrieve [lost daguerreotypes with μ-XRF imaging](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-27714-5) because I think that's fantastically cool. The title is an atomic number. I went with the maxim of _write what you know_ and apparently that includes radioactivity. [thisbluespirit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisbluespirit/) and Ashlyme, this one's for you.


End file.
